10/26 exercises

Malchik describes social capital as neighborliness and goes on to say that walking throughout your neighborhood and interacting with others creates that feeling of neighborliness. My community supports walkability a little bit. We have several parks and a zoo nearby to walk through and build up that sense of neighborliness through the sharing of a lovely walk on an autumn day or looking at all the animals in the zoo. I think my community’s walkability hasn’t really helped my own social capital all too much, but I do know that around the corner from my apartment there is an old lady that does radio calisthenics early in the morning on the sidewalk outside her grocery store. I haven’t really interacted with her per se, but I do notice her and wonder what she is doing when I don’t see her. So I have a sense of neighborliness and concern when I don’t see her doing her daily exercises.

There are a few differences between walking during the day and walking at night. Starting off with the experiences you encounter, during the day you have full access to all the shops in your area, but at night you may not have access to those shops anymore but at the same time there may be shops that are only open at night time so it’s like seeing two sides of the same community which is important to get when getting the feel for a community. Your perception of the public space does change when you see both the day and nighttime feels of the particular community. You see who hangs out in the area during the day and see what kind of place it is, but at night that community may change and it can change drastically depending on the nighttime scene and what that community looks like and has to offer.